Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 4, 7/12 by Estelle Roberts

From time to time I have enjoyed discussions with sceptical men and women from all walks of life. Mostly they were intelligent, fair-minded folk who came in a spirit of genuine inquiry. I always did my best to answer their questions as fully as I could. Often they would counter my explanations with their own theories.

The trouble with all such theories is that they never stand up to examination over a wide field of experiment. They may provide a complete and satisfactory explanation of the particular phenomenon under discussion and, indeed, of a wide range of similar phenomena. But extend the field of inquiry and immediately the most tenable of explanations gets wrecked beyond repair.

A popular theory, for instance, is that telepathy explains clairvoyance. The existence of telepathy is generally accepted by most people these days. So, say the theorists, it is not widely surprising if a person more than usually sensitive (the medium) should establish mental communication with his or her sitter. They even suggest that neither medium nor sitter may be aware of the thought transference between them.

This is a possible line of reasoning that can be made to explain some phenomena, the story of the caul just related, for instance. It apparently meets all the requirements. The women came to my house fully aware of the strange contents of her parcel. We are together in the same room and in picking up the package I am miraculously made aware of what it contains not mediumistically, as I maintain, but by thought transference working from her subconscious to mine. What could be simpler?

For the benefit of any reader who may have been reasoning along these lines, I offer the following account of an experiment I conducted recently, which, in my submission, disposes of the “telepathy” theory once and for all. It did not begin as an experiment but as an ordinary sitting which was remarkable only in that a doctor visitor was acting as proxy for someone living in Canada.

Clairvoyantly I described an act of suicide, where it had happened and how it was done. Every word I spoke the doctor faithfully recorded for transmission to Canada. At the end of the sitting he read back what I had said, telling me that his friend in Canada was the wife of a man who had killed himself. In due course a reply came from Canada, suggesting that the doctor must have unknowingly hinted details of the suicide to me or, failing that, these must have been uppermost in his mind at the sitting.